Weird things that can happen with /dev/null. One thing that
apparently happened quite often in the history of Unix is /dev/null
getting deleted or replaced with a regular file. So, what are some
ways that this could have ended up happening by accident, beyond
deleting and messing around with /dev/null directly? Well, here’s
one interesting thing that I’ve found out. If you set your Bash
history to /dev/null and run as root, and execute more than
$HISTFILESIZE commands, then Bash will end up moving /dev/null
somewhere else and replacing it with a regular file. Ha, now that is
an interesting way that problem can get caused.
20181102/DuckDuckGo /dev/null got replaced by regular file
20181102/https://serverfault.com/questions/551628/dev-null-file-became-regular-file/551644
20181102/https://serverfault.com/questions/551628/dev-null-file-became-regular-file/663642#663642